Effective coping is guided by purpose, which is your life shopping cart containing your beliefs, convictions, motivators, identity, and actions. Purpose, which is usually linked to values, morality, and community spirit, is what gives you confidence that your life is moving in a desirable direction. It is often linked to important parts of your life, like career, parenting, and social activities. Thus, when faced with life events like empty nest, retirement, and loss of spouse, we hear comments like, “I’ve lost my sense of purpose”; “I suddenly feel useless”; “I’ve stopped moving forward in my life.”
Jordan Grumet, M.D., writing in Psychology Today, notes that having a purpose in life can be both positive and negative. On the positive side, there are many documented health benefits—decreased mortality rate, better cardiovascular functioning, lower risk of depression—for those showing a greater sense of purpose. On the negative side, however, for many the search for purpose can lead to frustration, low self-esteem, additional stress, and feeling unworthy. What went wrong for these people? Grumet believes the search goes awry when people over-inflate their goals: they think unrealistically, striving to achieve “monumental things like starting a billion-dollar company, becoming a world leader, or changing the course of history.” These goals sound great, but they’re tough to accomplish because doing so depends on all sorts of things that are just out of your control. More often than not, trying to attain the impossible will leave you frustrated and feeling like a failure.
Grumet believes you will do much better when searching for a sense of purpose in your life if you focus not on the unattainable, but on smaller goals that bring you satisfaction, contentment, and a sense of worthiness. For instance, your purpose could be found in community service to those in need, or in teaching your children—and yourself—how to learn from failure. Just remember, finding purpose is like finding happiness. You do not find happiness; it emerges from actions you perform—and so it is with purpose. Behave in ways that make you feel useful, needed, and competent, and purposefulness will emerge before you.
To help you structure your task, Grumet feels that you can profit in your path to purpose by considering your regrets. He says, “l’ve never heard a dying patient say, ‘I regret trying and failing.’ More often, they say, ‘I regret not trying at all.’ Once you’ve named the regret you’d carry with you to the grave, you have a purpose anchor. You now have a blueprint for what to prioritize while you’re alive, healthy, and capable of change.” The great American skier, Lindsey Vonn, said from her hospital bed following her terrible fall in the 2026 Winter Olympics, “The only failure in life is not trying.” The road to effective coping with stress is paved with purposeful actions that carry you forward, not with avoidance behaviors that will leave you behind and stagnant.
Yes, growing into a more purposeful person can be a challenging and difficult task. But remember, having a sense of purpose involves attacking challenging and difficult tasks. As President Kennedy said to Americans in his 1962 challenge to reach the moon before the end of the 1960s, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
Psychology and Stress 